DATE: Thursday, September 28, 2006
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the Philip M. Morse Reading Room, E40-106
ABSTRACT
The notion of a “market” has undergone a paradigm shift
with the Internet -- totally new and highly successful markets
have been defined and launched by companies such as Google, Yahoo!,
Amazon, MSN and eBay. Another major change is the availability
of massive computational power for running these markets in a centralized
or distributed manner.
In view of these new realities, the study
of market equilibria, an important, though essentially non-algorithmic,
theory within Mathematical Economics, needs to be revived and rejuvenated
with an inherently algorithmic approach. Such a theory should not
only address traditional market models but also define new models
for some of the new markets.
In this two-talk series, I will give
a feel for the exciting work going on on this front. Interestingly
enough, this work has also contributed handsomely to the theory
of algorithms itself. In particular, the highly successful primal-dual
schema from exact and approximation algorithms, which was so far
used for combinatorially solving special classes of linear programs,
has been extended to solving nonlinear convex programs.
